


The Calm Before the Storm

by Argenteus_Draco



Series: Soldiers and Spies and Avengers [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: But Probably an AU, Canon Compliant (Mostly) (Maybe), Character Study, Gen, Infinity War Reaction Writing, Natasha Has Trust Issues, Past Relationships, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), character sketch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 15:06:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14428110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argenteus_Draco/pseuds/Argenteus_Draco
Summary: The thing that really gets Natasha is seeing James smile. She still hasn’t found the words to tell Steve about their past. She thinks it might be better if she never does.A sort of sequel to What Makes the Dessert Beautiful, but can be read on it's own.





	The Calm Before the Storm

The thing that really gets Natasha is seeing James smile.

It’s small and hesitant when she enters the lab, testing, gauging her reaction to his greeting. “Hello, Natalia.”

“It’s Natasha, these days,” she says. “I’m American now. Like you.” He raises an eyebrow at her, and the corners of his mouth quirk up further, prompting her own to follow suit as if of their own accord. “You want to see the paperwork that proves it?” She is acutely aware of Steve watching her from across the room. She still hasn’t found the words to tell him about their past. She thinks it might be better if she never does. Steve finally has Bucky back, there’s no need to bring up the Soldier.

But its difficult, uncomfortable even, keeping secrets from him now.

Outside in the marketplace, the tension between them eases. James is in his element in the Wakandan city, the way he must have once been in New York. He speaks isiXhosa as well as he speaks any of the other languages he’s needed over the years, and he smiles readily at the vendors who wave and call out to him, at Natasha and Steve walking on either side of him as he points out this sight or that, at the gaggle of children who race over and effectively block their path until Bucky laughs delightedly, produces a handful of sweets from a pocket of his vest and kneels to hand them around. Natasha chances a glance at Steve, ready to quip a joke, but the look on his face stops her.

“What is it?” she asks, keeping her voice low.

Steve watches as Bucky ruffles a little girl’s braids, and she reaches up and tugs on his loose hair in reply. “He had a sister,” Steve says after a moment, half a whisper. “I don’t know if he remembers.”

Suddenly, Natasha’s earliest memories of the Soldier, of the way he had treated the younger girls when they brought him to the Red Room, make a good deal more sense.

Bucky looks up at them, eyes bright, and makes a beckoning gesture. Curious, Natasha and Steve both kneel next to him, only to have more of the children close in on them, little hands tugging on jacket straps and babbling happily in their native tongue until they can examine their hair and, in Steve’s case, beard. One of the boys starts to weave a plait into Natasha’s, but it’s too fine to stay. Having apparently come to the same conclusion, he makes a face and says something in isiXhosa that’s too fast for Natasha to catch it before he turns back to Bucky, who laughs.

“They’ve never seen blond hair before,” he explains. “He wants to know if it’s always so difficult to manage.”

Natasha manages a small smile of her own. “The drug-store dye job doesn’t help.”

A quick translation, more confused expressions from the Wakandans that brings another peal of laughter out of Bucky, and the children move on to other distractions. Steve helps haul Bucky to his feet again, and the three of them do the same.

“They know you,” Steve says, as Bucky accepts three skewers of local fruits dusted in spices from a shopkeeper. “Not just the kids. Everyone.”

“I do sort of stand out here.”

“It’s more than that though.” Steve looks to Natasha, who focuses on her food, and then around them at the crowded street. “It’s not just the Winter Soldier they’re seeing. It’s… you.”

“I’ve been in and out,” Bucky acknowledges, gesturing with his left hand, maybe to indicate the cryo-freeze chamber, maybe to indicate the country. “Sometimes just a day, sometimes longer.”

“I didn’t know.” The guilt is Steve’s voice is easy to read. _I would have come back for you_. Bucky waves it off.

“Everytime I wake up, Shuri’s fixed a little more.” He taps metal fingers to his temple before letting the limb fall to his side again. Every few steps, his knuckles brush against Natasha’s. She isn’t sure if it’s intentional, or if he just hasn’t mastered control of the new arm. “There are still… blank spots,” he says, looking unsure, “when I think about some things. But it’s better.”

Natasha knows this feeling too well. Some things have been taken from her. Some she has convinced herself it’s better to forget. (Actually forgetting them is an entirely different and much more difficult matter.)

“What sort of things?” Steve asks quickly.

Bucky doesn’t answer, at least not in words, just watches Natasha out of the corner of his eye. She’s prepared to ignore him, to brush it off like it’s no matter, but when she turns her gaze to look at him again he has that damn _smile_ playing over his lips—

“Oh,” she hears Steve say, apparently recognizing this particular expression on his friend. “Oh.”

“It wasn’t—” Natasha starts, not sure where she intends to go, but immediately realizes that she’s said the wrong thing as the grin is wiped from Bucky’s face and is replaced, just for a moment, with a flash of the Soldier’s blank stare. She takes a breath, and tries again. “It was a long time ago.” It’s not a lie, she tells herself. Their past is just that, and their future is so uncertain.

Bucky shares a look with Steve that Natasha can’t quite read. Then he steps quickly in front of her, forcing her to come to a stop in the middle of the crowded street. Metal fingers touch her chin gently, tilting it up so that he can study her face. She forgets, sometimes, how much taller he is than she. “But you do remember?” he asks softly.

 _Remember what?_ she wants to ask him. _Your hand to hand combat lessons? The hotel room in Gothenburg? Reporting back after São Paulo, where we never should have been? Odessa? Berlin?_

“Yes,” she says simply, her voice equally quiet, reverent. “I remember.”

James breathes out what she thinks is a sigh of relief, and drops his hand to his side again. Steve clears his throat awkwardly. “You two want to do this somewhere more… private?” he asks, even though the Wakandans are completely ignoring their little display; a few even shake their heads and cluck their tongues at Steve for being the one to draw attention to their scene. Still, Natasha is grateful for the distraction. She takes the moment to center herself, to fix a small, hopefully reassuring smile of her own onto her face in response to James.

“Steve’s right. We should get back,” she says. “This has been nice, but…” she trails off, turns her gaze on Steve, “we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

The two of them share another knowing look before James nods his reluctant agreement, and they fall into step again, turning onto the road that will take them back toward the palace. They walk in silence until Mount Bashenga begins to come into view, and Steve leans toward Bucky and whispers something that puts the smile back on his face, and makes Bucky shake his head and shove Steve away with his elbow, giving Natasha a brief glimpse of the boys who had left Brooklyn a quarter of a century ago.

In an hour, they will be soldiers and spies once more, strategizing with T’Challa and Sam and the Dora Milaje. Natasha takes the image of those bright, carefree smiles, and fixes it in her memory in case it’s the last time she sees them.

 

+-+-+-+

 

Steve finds her again that night, walking through one of the rooftop gardens. It’s strange to her that even a place designed to express the power of the throne should be so beautiful. The vast cityscape below them has gone quiet. The orders have been given. Those who can evacuate the city and surrounding villages have left. Anyone capable of bearing arms has been called. The rest of Wakanda’s citizens are making their way into the heart of the mountain. They still don’t know what protection the vibranium in the mines will offer against Thanos and his troops, but it is the best defense they have.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Steve says, coming up beside her and leaning against the railing. “The first peaceful place we’ve stayed in three years, and I can’t sleep either.”

“You and I,” Natasha tells him dryly, “have very different definitions of funny.”

Steve laughs — mostly, she thinks, to annoy her — and his next words are ridiculously fond. “Please no games tonight. You know as well as I do that carrying this into tomorrow is only going to make it harder. Talk to me, Nat. What’s wrong?”

She purses her lips together, hating that he’s right. And okay, maybe Steve’s smile gets to her a little, too. Like James’, it lights up his eyes and makes her want to believe that everything will work out, even when her more rational, pragmatic self says how unlikely that is. “I hope you can understand, Steve,” she says slowly. “It's not that I didn't trust you. But at the time… I genuinely didn't believe that we would ever get him back. Thank God you're so stubbornly optimistic.”

He raises his eyebrows but doesn't ask anything further of her. It's hard to maintain eye contact when his politely curious expression seems so incongruous to their situation. She’s about to betray the trust they’ve built over the years, she knows how dangerous a lie of omission can be, just look what it wrought between Steve and Tony—

But she also wants very badly to trust him, in his good nature, in her own belief that Steve is as quick to forgiveness as he is to anger. He’s changed her, as surely as Clint has, as surely as she has changed him. She wants to believe it’s for the better. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll get past all of this tonight, and if there is even a chance for her to have a future with James, Steve will help her to realize it.

(Even if sometimes she doesn’t feel that she deserves it.)

She brought the papers that she has been carrying since Kiev out to the garden with her, read them over again, compared their stark, cold analysis with her own fading, cherished memories. Now she holds the worn, folded bundle out to Steve. “I’m sorry. When I gave you that file after D.C.,” she says slowly, “it wasn’t complete.”

He accepts the papers and flips through them, and Natasha turns her face out toward the city but watches him out of the corner of her eye. One thing she can always count on: Steve Rogers wears his heart on his sleeve. She can track his progress through his facial expressions. A quick, sharp exhale tells her he’s finished the list of mission completed by the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, and reached the point where their affair was revealed. A wince; Yelena’s betrayal. Or her own; Natasha confessed, she sentenced James to a memory wipe and cryo-freeze as effectively as her sister. Eyes narrow dangerously, and she thinks he’s reached the reports written by HYRDRA officials written after they had reclaimed and reprogramed their asset.

“Is this it?” he asks, eyes still on the last page.

Natasha huffs repressed laughter. “Besides the intimate details?” she asks. “Yes, that’s the lot. Everything I didn’t tell you.”

“It’s just,” he says, sounding vaguely apologetic, “I already knew about this.”

She had gone through a lot of possible reactions before deciding to allow Steve into this part of her past, but this— this had not been one of them. Steve Rogers is a tank, not a spy. How could he possibly have discovered—? She doesn’t think that Fury even knows. Her jaw actually drops open. “You— How?”

“Before he went back into cryo-freeze,” Steve explains, “Bucky gave me his journals. You have no idea how much I missed you,” he adds, “trying to translate them. He wrote half of it in the Cyrillic alphabet, but I managed.”

“So you knew—”

“I knew,” Steve confirms. “Even some of the… ah… intimate details,” he says, a faint blush rising on his cheeks, “that I would have preferred to skip over.” Then: “For what it’s worth, Nat, I’m glad he had you.”

She has no reponse to that except a quiet, reverent, “Thank you.” She takes the pages back when he offers them, and they both turn their gazes skyward. There are more stars visible here than she has seen in a long time. Then again, not all of the lights twinkling above them are stars, a harsh reminder of what brought them to Wakanda in the first place.

“Take care of him,” Steve says suddenly, and before she can reprimand him for indicating anything to the contrary he continues, “even if we all manage to make it through this… there are things I’m never going to understand. He’s going to need you.”

(Years later, Natasha will learn that this is almost word for word what Sarah Rogers had told Bucky Barnes one rainy winter night in 1937, when there had been a bad flu going around the building they lived in and she had thought that her son was fevered enough to be sound asleep, and not listening. For now, Natasha only nods agreement solemnly.)

“I’ll do my best,” she says. It’s the best promise she can make without lying.

Tomorrow, they will be soldiers and spies and — dare she think it — Avengers. Tomorrow, she will be as strong as she needs to be to protect the ones she loves the most. Tonight, she leans into Steve’s shoulder, lets him put an arm around her and guide her gently inside to the rest of their friends, and tries to make her own smile as honest and easy as his, hoping it can be a comfort to someone else.


End file.
